In 1893, when the committee of the Munich Exhibition were moved by the writings of Cornelius Gurlitt to have some of these works sent over to Germany, a certain disappointment was felt in artistic circles. And any one who is accustomed to gauge pictures by their technique is justified in missing the genuine pictorial temperament in Watts. The sobriety of his scheme of colour, his preference for subdued tones, his distaste for all "dexterity" and freedom from all calculated refinement, are not in accord with the desires of our time. Even his sentiment is altogether opposed to that which predominates in the other New Idealists. Burne-Jones and Rossetti found sympathy because their repining lyricism, their psychopathic subtlety, their wonderful mixture of archaic simplicity and _décadent hautgoût_, stand in direct touch with the present. Watts' pictures seem cold and wanting in temperament because he made no appeal to the vibrating life of the nerves. But the same sort of criticism was written by the younger generation in Germany, seventy years ago, on the works of Goethe, which have, none the less, remained fresher than those of Schlegel and Tieck. What is modern is not always the same as what is eternally young. And if one endeavours, disregarding the current of the age, to approach Watts as though he were an old master, one feels an increasing sense of the probability that amongst all the New Idealists of the present he has, next to Boecklin, the best prospect of becoming one. In spite of all its independence of spirit, the art of Burne-Jones has an affected mannerism in its outward garb. The sentiment of it is free, but the form is confined in the old limits. And it is not impossible that later generations, to whom his specifically modern sentiment will appeal more and more faintly, may one day rank him, on account of his archaism in drawing, as much amongst the eclectics as Overbeck and Führich are held to be at the present time. But that can never happen to Watts. His works are the expression of an artist who is as little dependent upon the past as upon the momentary tendencies of the present. His articulation of form has nothing in common with the lines of beauty of the antique, or the Quattrocento, or the Cinquecento. It is a thing created by himself and to himself peculiar. He needs no erudition, and no attributes and symbols borrowed from the Renaissance, to body forth his allegories. With him there begins a new power of creating types; and his figure of Death--that tall woman, clad in white, with hollow cheeks, livid face, and lifeless sunken eyes--is no less cogent than the genius with the torch reversed or the burlesque skeleton of the Middle Ages. Moreover, there is in his works a trace of profundity and simple grandeur which stands alone in our own period. It is precisely our more sensitive nervous system which divides us from the old painters, and has generally given the artistic productions of our day a disturbed, capricious,